Racism is an ounce of jam
What is racism? Considering it in the context of colonialism, Frantz Fanon wrote: “It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization.”
I’ve seen no greater example of that than on Robben Island. I’m not talking of the tiny cells where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and other titans of the struggle against Apartheid were locked up, or the small cottage where Robert Sobukwe spent six years in total isolation. I think instead of the small piece of paper on which the different diets to be served to Coloureds/Asiatics and Bantus (the blacks) was typewritten, probably at some point in the 1960s.
The blacks were given an ounce less of meat, half an ounce less fat, and no jam or syrup. The Coloureds got an ounce a day — there are roughly 12 ounces in the average jam jar. That is racism for you in a nutshell, that cruelty which denies someone an ounce of jam a day while refusing to see them as human beings.
I thought of this while watching Trevor Noah talk about the police killings of black people with a grace and empathy out of reach for most presenters sitting on mountains of white privilege. As someone raised in Soweto, he would have been forgiven some rage. But instead, he spoke with calmness and clarity, just laying out the facts and inviting his audience to make their conclusions.
That poise made me think of Nelson, who had driven me all over Johannesburg on my first visit to South Africa in 2006. It was Nelson who took me to the Apartheid Museum, and who avoided my questions about it later. One day, not long before I was to leave for Durban, he stopped the car by the roadside in the middle of a journey. He popped the trunk open and got out of the car.
If it had been someone else, I would have been terrified. But Nelson was in his 60s and as intimidating as a big teddy bear. When he returned to the driver’s seat, he passed me an old photograph. It was nearly yellow with age, but the scene it captured grabbed your attention.
A distinguished looking man in a fedora was at the heart of the picture, sitting on a small rock. Dozens of others were ranged in concentric circles around him. It was, presumably, a meeting of some sort, with the man in the hat holding court.
Nelson pointed to him with a finger and said: “That was my father.” As he started the car and we drove on, he told me the story. His father had been an African National Congress leader in the 1950s. After the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960, he was taken into custody. He spent much of the next four years in solitary confinement, and was subjected to brutal torture.
By the time he was released, he was so traumatised that he barely spoke a word until he passed away a few days before the Soweto uprising in 1976. Nelson stayed away from politics, and as proud as he was of his father, he was prouder still of his son, an osteopath in London.
In all the days that he drove me around, I never once heard Nelson speak ill of white people, or those that had destroyed his father’s life. I asked him if he’d ever been to the Apartheid Museum. He hadn’t. “I don’t want to know what all they might have done to him,” he told me.
His lack of anger bothered me. I couldn’t understand it. I kept telling myself that if I’d been in his place, I’d have taken up the gun or worse. I just couldn’t square what his family had gone through with the composure he showed on a daily basis.
When I could bear it no longer, I asked him how he did it, how he found it in his heart to forgive. “Madiba showed us that,” he told me. “If he could forgive them, who am I not to?”
I admit I still don’t get it. Each time I think back to that photograph and the man at its centre, I feel white-hot rage. It’s measure of how special a man Nelson was that he had managed to douse whatever anger he once felt.
His story is the main reason why I cringe when I hear non-black folk glibly talk of how they “understand” what their darker brothers and sisters are going through. I’m sorry, but you don’t have a clue. Most of us don’t have a back story remotely comparable to Nelson’s, and we should be absurdly grateful for that.
There are thousands of Nelsons all across the world. But for their grace and ability to forgive, we really would be looking on darkness.